Publii: Open-source local WYSIWYG static site CMS
github.com
github.com
Broadly, this looks good for a blog format, but not sure if that's what people need?
Anyway, for those interested, I just use http://zim-wiki.org plus a custom CSS template I did.
With this:
https://github.com/jrm4/Eight-Five-Zero
(Kind of messy, but it's utilitarian for my work and such)
It's really nice that I can update the website in the middle of class as I'm teaching with very little issue.
Yes! Dreamweaver was good 19 years ago and remains good today. Being able to see what you're doing, without running like treacle in the browser whilst editing (I'm looking at you, Divi and other WP visual theme builders), is an awesome experience. Like professionals in many other fields expect from their software.
I was there, too. Dreamweaver was not good enough.
Notepad.exe was good 19 years ago.
Dreamweaver? Not so much.
:)
It was a great tool for learning HTML and CSS though, but mainly because you would always end up just going into the source to fix it and view in DW.
I would be very nervous of anyone using it these days for anything else.
Most who used Dreamweaver and relied on its extensions are now using another similar app called Wappler.
I recall using HotDog Professional for my personal stuff. Anyone else use it?
Good for what ? I remember designers trying to create pages with and the generated code was useless garbage once the customisation requests came in and they called in a dev
I saw it work reasonably well when someone took a code-first approach with the overall website templates which avoided the mess from building these up using DW's code generation. You could then set it up so people could only mess with the certain parts of the page which avoided the overall site getting messed up as you added others. This got cleaner when they introduced Contribute.
Dreamweaver was created for a time when there was still a webmaster-type role in companies. These people didn't necessarily have what we'd consider a strong dev skillset, but the world around them had started to change which explains the range of capabilities in Dreamweaver.
If you want to see some terrible server-side code generation, you should checkout Drumbeat (https://macromedia.fandom.com/wiki/Macromedia_Drumbeat).
We had the likes of Netscape Composer, Front Page and Dreamweaver. They produced mountains of un-maintainable and not non-compliant html code.
When HTML5 came along there was a big push for compliant sites. Also it made sense to have a developer use the power of CSS3 to handle layouts and responsiveness elegantly. So the WYSIWYG editors fell out of favour.
The inability to have interactive data-based content in static sites is why I went away from them, but the ability to progressively enhance a Next or (especially) SvelteKit site with data-y bits when it makes sense has gotten me in the habit of using them. Kind of a fan.
The problem is that if you have to pull down the site to edit content, it defeats like 99% of the use cases of a CMS. The whole point of a CMS is to provide an interface for editing a website without editing code directly and not having the code on locally to make edits.
So now simple solutions, static HTML, free or one-time fee CMSs are sexy again. (economy is not good, who wants another subscription?)
I know because 14 years ago we have created static, drag and drop CMS that people still buy today. People value basic features. And it's hard to make a complex software that's easy to use.
Basic features are still enough, after 14 years. https://sitecake.com
Because we wanted Dynamic webpage back then. Or at least dynamically generated webpage when something is updated, like links and comments ( When every site was still hosting their own comment sections ). Develop Locally and push Static Site to web may work on Web pages, but doesn't really work for website with some traffic or what we called blog today.
Especially when we were on HDD and single core CPU, updating a few hundred pages takes quite a bit of time. Before uploading tens of Megabytes of Data that takes hours on 56K or ISDN. Compared to being hosted on the web where everything was a press of a button.
Now we are on SSD, where our IOPS is anywhere from 100x to 1000x faster. Even updating sites like Tomshardware or Anandtech should only take seconds. We have Gigabit Internet, uploading should no longer be a problem.
I think vast majority of web site could simply be Static pages, with a small dose of javascript. And may be in the future you could even install your CMS on iPad or iPhone. There is no need to worry about anther Tumblr or Geocities taking down all your content. Your content will stay on your device, and possibly with some sort of Cloud Data Backup. ( iCloud or Google Drive )
This is actually something I keep talking about since ~2017. ( I cant believe that is 5 years already ) So I am glad we are finally moving in that direction.
From what I remember, the push for html5 and super lean / clean / and 'validating code' for google search results made it difficult for the older tools to stay in favor.
Also the move to mobile.. and not just "m.site" - making so javacript / bootstrap type things came to be favored for a while (lack of grid / flex in browsers at the time) - which mostly required text editors instead of wysiwyg.
the business models for investing in software were shaping cloud things around that time (some say for better, I say for worse) - so webflow, wordpress, adobe cloud everything, and similar had a chance to do the things that stand alone download and own software could of been doing.
Faster internet being more prevalent and such of course helped with these things.
I've been itching to spend a couple hours testing pinegrow site building ( https://pinegrow.com ) to see if it is reminiscent of the netobjects days.. and now that wordpress is getting increasingly painful to use and maintain, I'll likely get to that sooner than later.
I attempted to build a CMS years ago and this is pretty much exactly what I wanted to create... but sadly was too incompetent to finish.
Nice initial list of themes, hope they build up a designer community around this.
I could see a commercial hosted version being pretty popular as well (for companies that need to collaborate on posts). Easily could outcompete Squarespace and others.
Anyways, bravo!
I feel like the only thing holding Publii back is the lack of theme diversity, and definitely could use some third-party designer love to push it forward.
Not that it takes away from what looks like a great product, but that's the journey I went through, as a regular, overly-busy employee-startup founder, 14 hours into a Saturday. "I love it, but it's over my time-cost threshold if it needs custom themes".
I migrated from WordPress to Hugo for awhile, but eventually gave and migrated back. You can love WordPress or hate it, but it has an infinite variety of paid and free professional-quality themes. Hugo has a slew of one-person amateur projects, the best of which are half-baked clones of WordPress themes. What's worse, they tend to be poorly-maintained, and stop working whenever Hugo introduces breaking changes (which at least a few years ago, was frequent).
I appreciate all of the conceptual advantages of a static site generator versus a CMS application host. But for most users, a website tool is simply only as good as its theme ecosystem.
I do think that this does have an audience, travelers or those in places with bad network infrastructure like volunteers in the Peace Corps could make good use of this, where they may go months without getting internet access.
Also, I see this as a great tool to use for my personal non monetized blog, where I don't need the infinite variety of themes or the need to constantly keep the system up to date. I just want something I can type up notes or simple ideas and publish them simply. I don't think this is a huge subset of users right now, but it would be nice to have things like this more available for this type of use.
I looked into developing a theme using their theme system and it seemed unattainable for anyone who doesn't have significant time to invest in understanding the guts of Publii.
This repository can then be automatically synced to the live site via Cloudflare Pages. This option even allows using a private repository.
https://getpublii.com/docs/configure-cloudflare-pages-with-p...
Been researching some CMS' recently and was not really impressed, was thinking of a Frankenstein with Strapi but this looks like it could be absolutely perfect.
Great work, will check it out further and so far from what I see will be joining the community to help !
the only feedback I have is making co-editing easy. sometimes I co-write articles. this is rly hard with a desktop app.
Also, wishing for some kind of SEO plugin that would make writing descriptions easier.
All details in this post: https://www.callmefred.com/i-switched-from-wordpress-to-a-st...
Fair warning, it’s a bit rough around the edges.
Mind you, I haven't actually used it much beyond importing a WP site, so this isn't an endorsement.
Gave it a try - imported my hugo blog but then won't show me any of the content, just says "add content to a new site!" Hopefully this is an easy thing for fixing (I suspect the antiquity of my hugo blog might be confusing the issue.)
And another tool that got some traction back in the day: Radio Userland.
it is perfect for sites contain all public content though.
Nothing wrong with it. Just a mix and serves a purpose.
Thanks